The president of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries says he has asked the US to release some of its emergency crude oil stocks.
Purnomo Yusgiantoro was speaking to reporters in the Indonesian capital Jakarta. Yusgiantoro is also Indonesia's minister of energy and mineral resources.
His statement came crude oil prices retreated slightly in Asian trade after the world's largest producer, Saudi Arabia, declared its readiness to boost output.
Yusgiantoro said there was no need for a formal request to the US to release oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) but he had made his wishes known through the OPEC secretariat.
According to the US Department of Energy, the SPR is the world's largest emergency supply of crude oil and is designed to hold 700 million barrels when full. It has been drawn down on several, exceptional occasions, most recently after a series of hurricanes hit US oil output but such decisions have been controversial.
On Tuesday, Yusgiantoro had said there was no problem with world oil stocks. He said he had called on OPEC members to release all their supply into the market 'to give a positive signal to the market that
we are not facing any shortage'.
Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, said on Tuesday it was ready to raise production if asked but said shortages were not an issue at the moment.
World oil prices have surged by about two-thirds since the start of this year. Adjusted for inflation, however, they remain well below the levels reached in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution when prices soared beyond the equivalent of $80 a barrel in today's money.
